Abstract

We experience visual stability despite shifts of the visual array across the retina produced by eye movements.A process known as remapping is thought to keep track of the spatial locations of objects as theymove on the retina. We explored remapping in damaged visual cortex by presenting a stimulus in theblind field of two patients with hemianopia. When they executed a saccadic eye movement that wouldbring the stimulated location into the sighted field, reported awareness of the stimulus increased, eventhough the stimulus was removed before the saccade began and so never actually fell in the sightedfield. Moreover, when a location was primed by a blind-field stimulus and then brought into the sightedfield by a saccade, detection sensitivity for near-threshold targets appearing at this location increaseddramatically. The results demonstrate that brain areas supporting conscious vision are not necessaryfor remapping, and suggest visual stability is maintained for salient objects even when they are notconsciously perceived.